


An Awfully Deep Well

by Laura JV (jacquez)



Category: The Sandman (Comics)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-12-17
Updated: 2006-12-17
Packaged: 2018-01-25 08:26:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,378
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1641392
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jacquez/pseuds/Laura%20JV
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nothing endures but change.</p>
            </blockquote>





	An Awfully Deep Well

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to my betas, elynross and Basingstoke. Happy Yuletide!
> 
> Written for ghost lingering

 

 

**1\. They are not long, the days of wine and roses**

Butter-butter-butterflies were different, I think, I remember -- they were like light and air and happiness. I made them flowers in the air and they flew and flew and I can make flowers in the air now, but they have names like Opium and Screaming.

I think they used to have names like Fluffy.

They're in the air like flowers or fishies or toasters, but also inside my skull and sometimes they are in my belly and then they fight and fight instead of flying and sometimes they turn into moths or clowns and then everything spins more than usual, and then I have to make little mad dogs and little killing men to make it stop.

My doggy says I should not make little mad dogs because they might bite him. So I try but they come out mad anyway.

Sometimes I remember flowers falling and leaves in the air and my dress fading under my hands, and then Death comes and holds my head because it hurts, and she kills the remembering a little more every time because she does that. She means well but sometimes I think I could go back if she didn't kill remembering.

* * *

**2\. The mercy seat**

The grey of plague-death, the grey piles of bodies, the ashes, the stone. It was beyond her, this crush of hopelessness, of infants at dead breasts, of mothers losing ten children in a night, of the city burning and crumbling: a banquet and a feast and she was glutted already, rupturing, overflowing. The blood-red lines of Despair-that-was could not hold. She fell out of herself, despaired of herself, and lost herself, and only Death could find her.

The new Despair took up the sigil and took herself to the void behind the mirrors, each small, lost hope a sip, a bite, a sharp gouge of flesh.

* * *

**3\. Not so pleasing a thing**

I do love them, you know. I love their fretful, frail biologies and their fevered minds; love their bendable wills and oh, their hearts.

I change for them, become what they desire, what they are mad to taste, whatever it is. I am woman, man, youth, wealth, power.

Oh, my sweet, sweet sister. Sometimes I deliver them to you, wrapped around their bellies and their testicles and their hearts and their pain. Sometimes they pass through you, to one of our other sisters -- and oh, that too is sweet, like the jelly of their eyes and the animal smell of them in the night.

I love the way they lean towards me, every line of them hungry, wanting to fuck or take or have, have, have. And I give. I do.

And if Desire satisfied is not what they thought -- well, what is that to do with me?

* * *

**4\. The man in the mountain**

There's a man in the mountain, brother, with a laugh like thunder and hair like flames. When the night falls, he walks among the stars, taller than the trees; you can see his shadow crossing the fourth moon, brother, if you look.

No one knows why he came, back in my grandfather's grandfather's time, but the mountains shook when he laid his foot on them, and the farther face of the Green Rock fell into the river.

Oh yes, brother, the Green Rock used to be broad and flat on top, large enough for the whole village to stand upon and see down to the lake country.

We do not think he is a god, brother -- or perhaps he was once a god, but is no longer.

What would a man like him be the god of? He has never pissed a river, nor does he raise shapes out of stone, nor does he shoot fire from his hands, nor lay waste with his mighty voice. Mountains have their own gods, and stars are gods themselves, and the moons would laugh at him, and he is too like a man to be a god of men.

He has a home in the trees, and my grandfather says that he once had a tame animal that laughed and screamed at night, but that it has been silent since he was a boy. Perhaps it is dead, like all the people who were here when the man came, but the man is still there. Perhaps he will be there when I and my children are dust.

Perhaps he will go on forever.

* * *

**5\. Standing in the middle of an open road**

Dream, as of yet, has taken no one to his bed. He remembers that Dream-who-was had many lovers; that some of them were cursed or imprisoned; that some of them just left; that some of them died. He supposes Morpheus, Dream-that-was, must have been very lonely, to involve himself so much in sexual adventures.

It doesn't sound like the sort of thing he wants to get into, at least until he has spoken to Matthew and Eve about how to care for someone. Eve seems like the kind of woman who would know about the perils of romance, and Matthew -- well, Matthew is Matthew, and was once a mortal man, and Daniel supposes that has to be useful, somehow.

He took out his penis, once, and stroked it to stiffness, but why anyone would do that for recreation, he's not sure. Matthew tried to explain it, and then said, "Well, you were only a little kid when you turned into Dream. Maybe you just need to grow up."

Dream only lifted one shoulder in resignation and let the matter drop.

He eavesdropped on the dreams of mortals for a while afterwards, but it just looked awfully messy, and there was a lot of blood and crying in some of those dreams. He went to visit Desire, who kissed him and burrowed its hand into his pants, and his penis actually shriveled up close to his body, and Desire laughed and handed him a piece of candy.

When he ate it, it made him sick, and he supposed things like that were why Dream-that-was hadn't been all that fond of Desire.

* * *

**6\. When you choose an act, you choose the consequences of that act**

I am Endless, not Changeless. I do not cease but I am malleable; I am blind and can be led.

Even the past can change. I have felt it: the universe shaking itself apart, splitting itself into pieces, and living on. (My sister Death was merciful; she did not close her hand around it, to kill it and keep it whole.)

Living things always fight me, as if I am a thing to be fought. As if I am unchangeable, bearing down upon them, unavoidable, implacable.

You have a choice. You always had a choice.

* * *

**7. _as when the heart of this flower imagines_**   
**_the snow carefully everywhere descending_ **   


She is different every time, the one who Ends all things. She has held whole stars in her hand and closed them into themselves, leaving only blackness behind. She has spoken eye-to-eye with a beetle the size of a speck of dust, brushed her fingers over its minute carapace, and carried it with her into what-comes-next.

She is larger than the universe, and smaller than a spark. She is precisely what she needs to be, to bring the End to that which needs Ending.

The Ending is the only constant, and it comes on the beating of her wings, the touch of her feathers, soft as snow. (She might tell you it is the only real, true thing, if you could gather the courage to ask her: all things End but the Endless, and she is the one who will End even the others of her kind, one day. She is the only one who will never End, even when her purpose is served: there is then the long void for her, alone, until another universe sparks to life in the emptiness, in her open hand.)

* * *

 _Owl says that immediately beyond our garden Time begins, and that it is an awfully deep well. If you fall in it, you go down and down, very quickly, and no one knows what happens to you next._ \--"Christopher Robin", Czeslaw Milosz

 


End file.
